Around The Web - For The Love of Aviation

I ran across The Dreamy Dodo while searching for pictures for one of my previous blogs. He's now a daily bookmark. I don't know where the guy finds the photos that he does, but practically never do I see something there that I've already seen somewhere else.

A couple of examples to whet your appetite:

Seriously, The Dreamy Dodo is well worth a few minutes every day.

Flying Tigers Companion: Curtiss P-40 Warhawk

In conjunction with my Flying Tigers: Shadows Over China video series, I thought it would be fun to dig a little deeper into the history of some of the aircraft involved in the game. There's a few pretty obscure aircraft in there, but I thought I'd start with the most iconic aircraft in the game, the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk!

Developed from Curtiss's earlier P-36 Hawk, the base of the P-40 design was the same airframe as the Hawk, but redesigned from the firewall forward for the super-charged Allison V-1710 V-12 engine. NACA wind-tunnel evaluation of the basic shape ultimately pushed the engine's glycol coolant radiator forward to the chin position, creating the easily recognizable shape of the final aircraft.

The P-40Bs that originally equipped the AVG in China were armed with a pair of .50 caliber machine guns in the nose, firing through the propeller, and four .30 caliber machine-guns in the wings. Not as maneuverable in a turn as the Japanese Nates and Oscars that they tangled with, the AVG's P-40s maintained an advantage in dive speed and overall durability.

Fagen Fighters actually owns two flying P-40s, this P-40K which served in Russia, and a P-40E which flew in North Africa and is of the same type that the AVG flew. (My photo)

The AVG's P-40Bs lacked provision for drop tanks or bombs. In the spring of 1942, they received a handful of P-40Es, an upgraded model which remedied the B's chief vices: bomb racks, drop tanks, and better radios. The E models also traded the wing-mounted .30 caliber guns for a quartet of .50 caliber machine-guns.

Elsewhere, various P-40 models saw extensive service with the RAF in the North African theater against German and Italian aircraft. The USAAF used them in the Mediterranean theater (including use by the Tuskegee Airmen during their first eight months of combat), in Alaska, and in the Pacific, where a pair of P-40Bs were among the few to get off the ground and engage the Japanese during the attack on Pearl Harbor.

P-40E in AVG colors from IL-2 Sturmovik

The Soviets also received a number of aircraft via Lend-Lease. Not as numerous or popular as the P-39 Airacobra, the P-40 still proved a capable aircraft in the hands of Soviet pilots.

Those wishing to see the real thing are fortunate, as there are still a number of them in existence, both as museum displays and flying. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, France, the United Kingdom and the United States all have museums with one or more flying types in their collections, some of which make appearances at fairly far-flung airshows.

RAF Kittyhawk IIa from IL-2 Sturmovik

For those lacking the funding to purchase and restore one of these classics, there are a few plans or kit replicas that have been made available over the years. Currently Loehle Aircraft Corporation makes a replica kit, and both Jurca Plans and WAR Aircraft Replicas has previously had plans available. Unfortunately none of these companies have functioning websites at the date of this blog post.

Sim pilots will have a much easier time getting behind the controls of a P-40, as it is well represented across both the hardcore and flight-action genres. In addition to its appearance in Flying Tigers: Shadows Over China, P-40s can also be found in World of Warplanes (for both American and Russian fighter trees), Secret Weapons Over Normandy, IL-2, IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad, Flight Sim World, and Damage Inc. Pacific Squadron WWII, among others. For the simulation minded, Flight Sim World or the IL-2 series would likely be the best options.

Musuem Stories - Dornier DO 335 Pfeil

I first encountered the Dornier DO 335 Pfeil (Arrow), like a lot of weird WWII German aircraft, in Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. Back in the days when games came on 3.5" disks, and flight-sim manuals were hundreds of pages thick, serving as history primers and for battles and aircraft. I miss manuals like that. Two pages of legal disclaimers and a website link just isn't the same.

IL-2's DO 335 A-0 in a hard climb (and about to depart into a flat spin).

But I digress. As another of Hitler's "wonder weapons", the DO 335 was only produced in extremely tiny numbers before World War II ended. Powered by a pair of 1,726hp Daimler-Benz DB 603A engines, the A-0 and A-1 Pfeils could reach a top speed of 475mph, enough to run away from any of the common Allied aircraft in the European theater. The aircraft carried a single 30mm cannon firing through the front propeller hub, and two 20mm cannons in the cowling, firing through the propeller arc.

DO 335 cockpit in Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe

DO 335 upper and lower cockpit views in IL-2

The push-pull engine arrangement, while uncommon, has a number of advanages. Much better engine-out performance, P-Factor cancellation, and reduced drag being the major factors. It does suffer from a few common disadvantages as well, particularly in difficulty cooling the rear engine (an issue frequently shared by pusher aircraft), and potential to be hard on pilots who need to depart the aircraft in-flight. The DO 335 was equipped with one of the first ejection seats, coupled with explosive bolts to sever the dorsal fin and rear propeller blades, to solve the latter issue.

DO 335 external view in SWOTL

As with a lot of late-war German and Japanese aircraft, survivors are rare. In this case, there's only one left, one of two A-0s that were shipped to America after the war for testing. I encountered it at the Udvar-Hazy Center in Washington D.C., where it hangs out with all sorts of other rare aircraft. It's a huge aircraft, sitting high on its stork-like tricycle gear (which caused a number of development issues).

The genuine article at the Udvar-Hazy center, flanked by the only surviving Arado AR 234, and the museum's FW 190 F-8. (My photo).

Gear down in IL-2

In gaming, the best current(ish) representation of the DO 335 comes from IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946. The A-0 makes an appearance, plus an up-gunned version with a pair of additional wing mounted 30mm cannons that the game refers to as the V-13, but other documents reference as the B-2 model.

IL-2's V-13 fantasy variant.

Navy Blows Stuff Up Good!

When my siblings and I were all in our teen years, our long-suffering mother decided she needed to better understand these strange, smelly, awkward things that infested her house, ate all her food, and generally acted like half-feral savages with alarming regularity.

She turned to The H.I.M. book, a guide to Highly Identifiable Males, a seriously tongue-in-cheek (but still highly accurate) book for dealing with men who are, well, men. Anyway, it starts off with the theory that part of what makes H.I.M.s the way they are is that sometime around age three, we lose part of our brain (probably the unimportant part that deals with processing lots of emotions) in an explosion. We spend the rest of our lives looking to get that part of our brain back, usually by viewing (or better yet, creating) bigger, and better explosions.

I don't know if that's true. What I do know, is that the Navy sure knows how to make, and film, some good explosions.

(h/t to www.thedrive.com for showing the original video.

Mystery Solved - Positive Identification for the A-7D at Y14

70-1050 from another angle

A few weeks ago I wrote about a bit of a mystery concerning the A-7D on display at the Tea (Y14) airport. It seems that Wikipedia, Joe Baugher, and Million Monkey theater all list A-7D S/N 70-1050 as having been destroyed in 1981, while the dedication plaque at Tea states that the airframe in question is the one on display. Surely they can't be one and the same, right?


This led to an inquiry sent to the Air Force Historical Research Agency. A few weeks later, I had a response! According to official records, while 70-1050 was assigned to the Puerto Rico ANG, it was not written off following the 1981 attack. And while the AFHRA didn't send me the rest of 70-1050's records, it seems likely that it served out its days with the Puerto Rico ANG, until that unit switched to F-16 ADFs. When the Air Force needed an A-7D to put on display as a representative for the South Dakota Air National Guard, 70-1050 happened to get the call.

70-1050's manufacturer data plate.

In the end, maybe not much of a mystery, other than Wikipedia getting something wrong. But it's interesting to get information that's a primary source, and gives me the chance to help out a couple of cool websites and people who've put a bunch of time and effort into tracking a vast number of serial numbers.

Official Air Force inventory sheet scans showing airframe numbers. ZB means "Loss due to Ground Accident" according to the Air Force code guide.

Official Air Force inventory sheet scans showing airframe numbers. ZB means "Loss due to Ground Accident" according to the Air Force code guide.

Official Air Force inventory sheet scans showing airframe numbers. ZB means "Loss due to Ground Accident" according to the Air Force code guide.

Official Air Force inventory sheet scans showing airframe numbers. ZB means "Loss due to Ground Accident" according to the Air Force code guide.

Neat shot of the destroyed and damaged aircraft.

Guns on a Fighter - How Hardware Problems Became Software Problems

In my professional guise as a Software Test Engineer, I sometimes run across stories that make me wish I could spend a few hours picking the brains of the test lead on some project or another. The recent articles about the F-35B/C’s gun pod, and last year’s articles about the F-35A’s internal gun issues were one such example. How far we’ve come in a hundred years or so, that the function of a fighter aircraft’s most basic weapon can be impeded by software problems.

The Fokker Eindecker, the first successful fighter fitted with Interrupter gear. Despite its spindly appearance, it gave rise to the "Fokker Scourge". Source

It certainly wasn’t always this way. In World War I, when pilots abandoned their handguns, grenades, and rifles in favor of fixed machine-guns, the first problem was where to mount them? Two-seat aircraft mostly began by giving the weapons to the observer. Single-seaters tried mounting them above the wing, firing clear of the propeller arc, or placing the engine and propeller at the rear to allow a clear forward firing position.

Largely through trial-and-error, it was discovered what seems obvious in hindsight: that for a single-seat, maneuverable fighter, the best place for guns to be placed was in the direct line of sight of the pilot, firing over the nose of the aircraft. “All” the pilot had to do was point the nose of the aircraft where he wanted the bullets to go. Unfortunately, since most aircraft of the time also hung their single engine and propeller on the nose, placing machine-guns behind the propeller tended to have negative consequences once bullets started impacting the spinning propeller blades.

Solving this clearance problem was a hardware issue, not software. Interrupter gear, a clever mechanical system of synchronizing a machine-gun and propeller so that the gun fired only when the bullet would not hit a propeller blade, was the ultimate answer. Other options were tried, however, particularly by the British and French forces. Most famously, Roland Garros equipped his Morane-Saulnier Type L with steel wedges on the propeller to deflect bullets which otherwise cause damage. This worked as well, but the degraded propeller and engine performance meant that the solution was abandoned for synchronization gear once it became available.

The gun remains an integral part of almost every fighter and attack aircraft’s arsenal. The experiences of the Vietnam War, where gun-less F-4 Phantoms found themselves in knife fights with cannon-armed MIGs seared the requirement into the institutional memory of the U.S. Air Force. No USAF fighter is likely to be without a gun for a very long time to come.

Despite being primarily a attack bomber, the gun equipped F-105 scored 24 of its 27 kills in Vietnam with its internal 20mm cannon. Source

That being said, it does seem that the gun has become less vital than ever. Where the F-16 has the capacity for up to 511 rounds for its M61A1 20mm cannon, the F-35A carries only 182 for its 25mm GAU-12. This decrease in capacity means that every shot needs to count.

And thus we come back to the software problem. Where WWI pilots used a basic aiming reticle and fought at slow speeds and point-blank ranges, the F-35 uses a helmet mounted sight and integrated aiming to assist with accuracy. That takes targeting software. The gun itself has to be hidden behind a small door when not in use, that too requires a software solution, not mechanical, to ensure that the shutter is always opened before the gun fires.

F-35A near a refueling tanker. The internal cannon is hidden inside the bulge on the upper fuselage ahead of the wing root. Source

That’s a lot of unit testing. That’s a lot of systems integration testing. That’s a whole lot of regression and halo testing, because the targeting system is concerned with a lot more than just the gun, and the flight computers have to be involved too because the position of the gun causes a slight yawing motion when fired.

My hat’s off to the QA department at Lockheed Martin.

Research aided by Wikipedia, and F-16.net

Book Review - Without Precedent: Commando, Fighter Pilot, and the True Story of Australia's First Purple Heart

Due to my book backlog, it took me far longer to get to Owen Zupp’s most recent release than it should have. Zupp’s previous two aviation collections, Fifty Tales of Flight and Fifty More Tales of Flight were excellent, and I’d been looking forward to reading Without Precedent: Commando, Fighter Pilot, and the True Story of Australia's First Purple Heart since he’d announced it.

A departure from his previous books, Without Precedent is part biography, part war story, shaded in the memories, love, and respect of a man for his father.

We meet Phillip Zupp as a young boy, and follow his upbringing in the hardscrabble farm life he was born into, and share his wonder at his first airplane sighting in the 1920s. As World War II engulfs the whole of the globe, we see Phillip make one of the most fateful decisions of his life, joining the RAAF to train as a navigator before transferring to the army and ending up in Papua New Guinea as a commando before war’s end.

Post-war, Owen chronicles Phillip’s life through serving as part of the Australian Army contingent in Japan near Hiroshima,  his return home, and ultimately, the process that found him back in the Australian Air Force, receiving flight training and being deployed to Korea flying the Gloster Meteor Mk.8 during the Korean war.

It’s the Korean war segment that truly elevates this book. Owen’s look at his father’s activities is unflinching, while taking pains to show the mindset and viewpoint behind the actions. The combat descriptions here are vivid and action packed, putting the reader right into the cockpit with Phillip, close enough to nearly smell the cordite, kerosene, and spent rocket fuel from missions.

If there is a flaw to the book, it’s that I honestly wanted it to be longer. Owen’s chronicles of his father’s post war flying career, which involved additional military flying, airline jobs, and flight instruction before ultimately having a twenty year career flying for the NSW Air Ambulance service gets far less page time than I would have wished for. A couple of memorable recollected life flights in particular left me wanting to read more about this portion of Phillip’s career.

Much more than just an excellent aviation story (though it certainly is that), this is the kind of book that parents should hope their sons or daughters are inspired to write about them one day. We may not live lives with the variety and excitement that Phillip Zupp did, but we should all be inspired to live our lives with courage, making the most of our abilities, and seeking to set examples that will inspire and encourage our own children.

Disclosure note: I bought this book on my own, and all opinions are my own. Amazon links are affiliate links.

The Aircraft of Battlefield 1 - An Overview

Battlefield 1 has quickly become my current multiplayer game of choice. Set in approximately the 1917 time frame after America entered the war, it showcases the clash of old and new technologies that defined the Great War. Horse-mounted cavalry charge alongside the first tanks. Infantry combat mixes machine-guns with spiked trench maces. Overhead, wood and canvas biplanes and triplanes duel to the death.

Official game art from EA. Fokker DR. 1 triplanes, a rocket armed SPAD XIII, and a Zeppelin!

 Aviation is my specific fascination; as regular readers will already know. Military aircraft evolved during World War 1 at a prodigious pace, moving from slow, unarmed reconnaissance aircraft whose pilots waved to their foes; to relatively fast powerful fighters armed with two or three machine-guns battling the first aerial bombers.

Battlefield 1 divides its aircraft into three types: Fighters, Attack, and Bombers. If you’re looking for accurate, simulator quality flight models, this is not the game for you. The aircraft look fantastic, however, while the game trades flight model fidelity for simplified fun that fits well with the rest of Battlefield’s vehicles.

For the next few weeks I’ll be doing a deep dive into some of the history and stories behind these aircraft.

First, the fighters. Battlefield characterizes fighters as anti-air focused, single-seat aircraft, with limited ground attack capability. The designers choose four of the most iconic aircraft of WW1 for this role: The SPAD XIII (France), Sopwith Camel (England), Albatros D. III (Germany), and Fokker DR. I (Germany). All great choices, particularly the iconic DR. I triplane, although I would have loved to see a Nieuport 11 and Fokker Eindecker from earlier in the war represented as well.

Nieuport 11 (replica)

Attack aircraft, which Battlefield defines as two-seat multirole aircraft with both air- and ground-attack abilities, draw from both fighter and reconnaissance aircraft used during the war. German gets the Rumpler C.I and Halberstadt CL. II, while the Allies get the Salmson 2 and Bristol F2B Fighter. The “Brisfit” is a particularly inspired choice, as its reputation was built on its success at fighting like a smaller, nimbler single seater.

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  Bristol F2B Fighter configured with bomb racks. Photo from the Imperial War Museum

Finally, for bombers, Germany gets the Gotha IV, while the Allies get the Caproni CA.5. Why an Italian bomber rather than a French or English design, I don’t know, but it does mean that all the major powers to field indigenous designs are represented.

World War 1 is an era that is seriously underrepresented in gaming. Here’s hoping that Battlefield and a couple of other games will turn developers’ eyes back to this tumultuous setting.